Enrico Fermi — "I believe that science is a universal language, and that it can bring people tog…"
I believe that science is a universal language, and that it can bring people together from all over the world.
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More from Enrico Fermi
"The problem of making a nuclear reactor is not a problem of physics, but a problem of engineering."
"It is much more important to be able to do something new than to be able to talk about it."
"The most important thing is to never stop questioning."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Scientific knowledge transcends national borders, political divisions, and cultural differences. Unlike spoken languages or religious traditions, the laws of physics and mathematics are identical everywhere on Earth. Science creates shared ground where people from opposing nations can collaborate, exchange discoveries, and build genuine understanding. It operates as a common framework accessible to any human mind willing to engage with evidence and reason, making it uniquely suited to unite rather than divide humanity.
Relevance to Enrico Fermi
Fermi lived this belief personally. Born in Rome, he fled Mussolini's antisemitic racial laws in 1938—collecting his Nobel Prize in Stockholm, then sailing directly to New York. On the Manhattan Project he collaborated with physicists from Hungary, Denmark, Britain, and Germany. His Chicago Pile-1 team in 1942 was itself multinational. Fermi's entire career depended on science crossing borders that politics had closed, making this conviction less an abstraction than a survival strategy and personal autobiography.
The era
Fermi's active years—roughly 1920 to 1954—spanned fascism's rise, two World Wars, the Holocaust, and the opening of the Cold War. Nationalism was tearing the world apart with catastrophic violence. Yet simultaneously, the greatest international scientific migration in history occurred: dozens of European physicists, many Jewish refugees, converged on American laboratories. The Manhattan Project itself demonstrated that scientific collaboration could unite people whose governments were adversaries, giving Fermi's universalist conviction genuine historical weight.
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